Damage
by chrissie0707
Summary: mid/post-ep 4.21 "When the Levee Breaks." Lots of language and angst. Extended brother-on-brother violence. Dean's pretty much done as soon as his forehead splinters the mirror. The guys that win fights aren't traditionally the ones picking glass out of their faces later.


_Damage_

Sam throws the first punch, but Dean knows he was asking for it.

" _Say it."_

" _It means you're a monster."_

Hell, he might as well have handed Sammy a notarized request form for One Fist in My Eye, Please. An asshole thing to say, sure, but it strikes Sam even harder than Dean would have thought. He was anticipating _hurt_ , and it kills him in a special place inside to know he's looking to hurt his brother, whether it be figurative or literal _._

" _It means you're a monster."_

Testing him, knowing it will put things in perspective, and if Sam is really as strong with the demon blood as he says he is, he'll be able to rein it in before he bashes his big brother's brains in.

It's not _hurt_ that Sam lashes out with.

Son of a bitch shouldn't be able to send him to the floor like he does, not with the first swing and not when Dean is expecting it. But Dean's bouncing off of the edge of the bed before he really feels the hit, before he realizes just how much the blood has affected his brother's physicality.

Now they have a problem. Sam's blowing like an angry bull behind him, and Dean knows the only way he's getting the kid back to Bobby's panic room is if he drags his unconscious, overgrown ass there.

Dean rises slowly and deliberately, and Sam's face is painted red with anger, with, _there's your goddamn raincheck, you arrogant dick_.

Dean's feeling plenty, himself, but if he lets emotion guide his actions now, one of them is likely to get very, very hurt. He puts a lid on the boiling pot inside and rewards the look and the punch with a hit of his own, swift and hard and in the exact spot that should draw the curtain closed. The force of his fist sends Sam staggering back, but he doesn't go down like he should.

Turns out when Sam said the demon blood makes him strong, he wasn't fucking around as much as Dean would have hoped. He shakes off the punch like he would a playful shove from a child and, seeing this, Dean doesn't aim to give him a chance to do much else.

He's business-like in his attack, knows exactly what he's doing and where he needs to strike without going all-out on Sammy. He's going for the knockout. _Go down, Sammy, please go down,_ running through his head with every punch thrown. He knows Sam will hurt him to get away if he gets the opportunity, just like he hurt Bobby.

Raw fury is always going to win in an otherwise evenly-matched brawl, and Sam just needs one small window. Dean brings his arm up just a hair too high to block a hit and Sam takes advantage, comes back at him full-force, not going for the knockout but for PAIN.

Dean's pretty much done as soon as his forehead splinters the mirror. You can be as hard-headed as you want to be, but in a fight there's no coming back from that. The guys that win aren't traditionally the ones picking glass out of their faces later. But Sam is still running on rage and didn't hear the bell ring like he did, and he grabs Dean's jacket, drags him away from the wall.

The kick backward breaks more than the décor of a mid-tier honeymoon suite, and Dean's not even looking to get up now. He's gasping dumbly on the floor without any of his senses working properly, just trying to draw a breath that can clear the spots without stabbing him in the chest when Sam's shadow falls over him.

He's dealing with some pretty serious tunnel vision when his brother reaches down toward him. For a brief, stupid, oxygen-starved moment Dean actually thinks Sam might be looking to help him up.

Sam's hands are locked around his throat, squeezing, but even through the gray haze of hypoxia Dean knows it doesn't mean, _I'm going to kill you._ It means, _you need to know that I CAN._ He knows it's the second one, because Sam releases him right before he completely loses consciousness. Driving home his point that Dean is too weak to do much of anything these days.

He hears the bass of Sam's voice booming above him more than he interprets the actual words he's saying, clings to the familiarity and uses it as a reference point when he starts to feel the drowsy tug backward.

Sam steps away, toward the door, and Dean's eyes roll with effort to follow his brother's movement.

" _If you walk out that door…don't you ever come back."_

It HURTS and he's not thinking clearly and he's going for shock value, for _SAMMY STOP PLEASE STOP_ , and he doesn't mean it. The room graying out around the edges, oxygen coming in thin and painful and not enough to keep the encroaching blackness at bay. Enough breath left for one thought and he tries to make Sammy stay in the worst possible way.

Dad's way.

The door closes and Dean tries to get up, fails spectacularly. Does it without thinking, pulling all credibility from what he's just threatened because the only thing that matters is stopping Sammy.

 _SAMMY STOP PLEASE STOP._

He rolls to the side and levels up on an elbow. Doesn't get any more upright than that when a nuclear explosion goes off behind his eyes, because he forgot how important breathing is while attempting to move around with more than one cracked rib and a pretty obvious concussion.

* * *

When Dean comes to the room is dark, and it takes a long moment to orient himself, twisted up on the floor with pieces of the hotel room scattered beneath him. He takes a deep breath to clear his head and almost chokes himself back into unconscious.

He settles into a pattern of relatively easy shallow breathing and shifts, testing his sore limbs. Shattered glass crinkles underneath and splintered wood moves with him. "Sam…" It hurts to talk, and the utterance itself is reflex and pain and knowing that Sam's usually somewhere nearby when Dean's feeling this monumentally fucked up.

He wants to ask his brother if he caught the license plate of the truck that hit him, remembers he saw it for himself and it said Sam Fucking Winchester.

Dean gets himself to his feet with an effort that pushes sounds out of him he wouldn't have allowed if there was anyone else in the room with him. Full minutes pass before he's leaning against the mattress, sweating bullets and taking stock of himself. The ribs'll be rough going for a few days but he can manage. It's the bag of rocks in his skull that's going to pose an immediate problem.

He pushes up from the bed and limps over to the mirror on the wall, throws up a hand to the textured wallpaper just in time to stop his slide back to the floor. Gravity mocks Dean's tired body and tugs hard as he studies his reflection. The entire face of the mirror is spider-webbed with cracks and he winces, thinks, _yeah, that looks about right._

 _Smoke on the Water_ trills from one of his coat pockets and Dean leans his forehead against the wall next the mirror and rolls to the side, props himself upright while digging for his cell phone. He flips it open with a shallow, grateful exhale, lets his eyes fall closed for a moment. "Bobby."

" _Dammit, boy. I've been callin' you for hours."_

Dean forces his eyes open and verifies the validity of this statement with a shaky glance at his watch. "Sorry, Bobby. Been sleepin.'"

" _I thought he'd killed you, Dean."_

Dean wants to fall into the concern leaking out of the phone, wrap up in it like a blanket, and sleep for a month. "I'm okay."

" _You don't sound it."_

"I'm okay," Dean repeats, but he knows better, and his body is screaming otherwise. When your face disintegrates glass, you're not OKAY after. He knows his limits intimately well, tells each and every one of them to go fuck themselves. He pushes off of the wall, wavers there for a moment with his left arm thrown out for balance and decides he's good. Well, good enough.

" _Dean?"_

"Mmm hmm."

" _Can you make it?"_

"Yep."

" _Then get back here, son."_

Bobby doesn't mean anything beyond _I'm here and I care_ , but every time he says "son" it's a reminder of everything Dean's lost.

He has more left to lose, and they need to get this show on the road.

First, though, he needs to wait for the room to stop fucking spinning and then maybe throw up a couple of times, which is really a bitch on the cracked ribs.

The anger will come later, once the haze of pain lifts. Right now, it's one foot in front of the other and don't let the security cameras get a full shot of your broken face while you're getting the fuck outta Dodge.

Right now, it's find Sammy.

* * *

 _Author Notes: Okay. I know this is both (a) a bit different for me and (b) a divisive piece. To those who will feel this was unfair to Sam: this was not about Sam. It was about Dean. I am a long-time fan, and this scene has haunted me since the night it first aired, and left me with a LOT of questions, beginning with Dean saying Sam was a monster. Clearly, we as viewers know that Sam attacked and reacted because hallucination!Dean called him the same thing. Dean did not know this. At the time of air, I thought that line was forced, because they wanted this fight. I didn't agree that Dean would say it. We as a fic-writing fandom exist to fill in the lines, and I hope everyone reading can appreciate that I was attempting to make sense of this scene, even if they didn't agree with my interpretations._


End file.
